Peter Lagorio wipes sweat from his face after a set of crunches. Through a variety of activities, Phoenix Multisport helps its members develop and maintain the emotional strength they need to stay clean.

Eric Harfert was more than 30 feet off the ground, clinging to a sandstone cliff in the majestic red-rock country near Moab, when suddenly he was overcome with emotion. Because he experiences post-traumatic stress disorder, he thought he was having a panic attack.

Then with tears welling in his eyes, Harfert realized the wave of emotion pouring over him came from the awareness of love he felt from fellow “team members” in Phoenix Multisport, a Front Range nonprofit organization that helps recovering alcoholics and drug addicts adjust to sobriety through group sports activities.

“It was realizing that people outside my family truly love me,” Harfert recalled of that day last May, “and that I truly love others in Phoenix Multisport.”

Since its creation in 2007 by recovering alcoholic Scott Strode, Phoenix Multisport has helped hundreds in recovery to get healthy and stay sober. With chapters in Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs, activities include rock climbing, hiking, boxing, cycling, weightlifting, yoga and CrossFit. All programs are free to participants, funded by grants and donations.

“This has changed my life; it’s saved my life a couple of times,” Harfert said at the Phoenix gym on Champa Street, four blocks from the Denver Rescue Mission and the Samaritan House Homeless Shelter. “It’s prevented me from getting to the end of a really dark place where I wanted to kill myself.”

Whether on a hike above Boulder, a busy night at the gym on Champa or on the indoor climbing wall at West Pines Recovery Center in Wheat Ridge, the love members have for each other is manifest as they interact with kindness and tenderness. Broken by substance abuse, they are uplifted together in healing.

“People in recovery, there’s an honesty to them that you don’t find in other communities,” Harfert said. “Everybody who is in recovery is raising their hand saying, ‘I have problems, and I’m working on them.’ People who don’t acknowledge that they have issues are never going to truly become enlightened. Myself, I’m 45 and I’m just getting to know myself. And it’s a pretty amazing thing.”

Phoenix is not a treatment program, nor is it a substitute for one.

“It’s that missing link between treatment and, ‘What now?’ ” said Teigon Shirley, who joined Phoenix as a member and became a full-time instructor.

A community of recovery

When Strode got sober 16 years ago in Boston, he had no clue what to do with the time he previously spent drinking and using drugs. He tried rock climbing after a brochure caught his eye and fell in love with the sport.

He also got into boxing, where he found fellowship with others who were in recovery. Still working through emotional trauma from his childhood, he ran the Boston Marathon, did triathlons, climbed in the Himalayas. Soon he realized he’d become a much different person since getting sober, but too many friends were stuck, unequipped to grow.

For a few years he lived the lifestyle that would become the basis of Phoenix while supporting himself as a coach, climbing guide and EMT. He began to believe a club offering running, climbing and cycling could provide the missing piece people in recovery weren’t getting from therapy and 12-step programs. He moved to Boulder and started Phoenix Multisport.

“The self-loathing and the shame, the self-esteem issue is a huge part of what shifts here,” Strode said. “Sometimes it happens all at once, and other times it’s like a slow process. You see people come into the climbing gym, the first day they’re looking at the ground, they won’t look you in the eye, they’re standing in the back. A year later, they have their goggle suntan because they were skiing, they’re like, ‘Hey, man, I’ll show you how to put on your harness.’ They just scoop you up when you walk in the door.”

That’s what happened to Aaron Tarr, who served four years in prison for “meth and meth-related crimes,” he said. After he got out, he violated parole and went back to prison for another six months. Then he found Phoenix.

“It became full of love for me, and it became my family,” Tarr said recently at the climbing wall. “I came in here and they just accepted me for who I was, just genuine love.”

Tarr was addicted to meth for 16 years and lost his family. At Phoenix, he found another one.

“The climbing for me is huge, because it reminds me of recovery,” said Tarr, 37. “You start small. You do it with somebody. They catch you when you fall. It gets more and more difficult — you do harder and harder routes. Your ‘higher power’ is your (climbing) gear. Without your gear, you’re dead. It reminds me of recovery so much.”

A construction worker, Tarr goes to one Phoenix activity or another almost every evening, and not just to stay busy. He wants to be with people who understand and care.

“In prison, nothing’s real,” Tarr said. “Everything is a lie, because you’ve got to put on this façade, this mask that you’re something that you’re not. When I came to Phoenix, I got to take that mask off and just be myself.”

Justin Burkhardt was running a liquor store in Centennial before he decided to get sober. Alcohol was his life. He did it for a living, he did it for fun, he lived in a house with four other guys in the liquor business. It was “Party Central.”

Even after he got a DUI, it took him a year to quit drinking. On probation and “monitored sobriety,” he still found ways to drink and get high. He couldn’t drink as much, so he started using more drugs.

“I took something bad,” Burkhardt said, “and made it worse.”

Finally, he decided to get sober, kicked out his roommates, sold his townhome and entered a 21-day in- patient program. While he was there, someone from Phoenix visited to talk about the program. A week after he got out of the in-patient facility, he began coming to climbing sessions at West Pines. He’s been coming twice a week for the past 18 months.

“When I first got sober, I was terrified,” said Burkhardt, 31. “Terrified of how to deal with the world. I completely separated myself from my own business, from friends, from family — everything that put me into the situation I was at. Phoenix was someplace I could come and feel completely welcome with open arms, which was the hugest thing ever for me. I’ve made some everlasting friendships in here, lifelong friends.

“I had friends before, but when I decided to change my life and get sober, no one ever called to check on me, so obviously those weren’t real friends. Now I have guys who call me on a regular basis, whether it’s to go climbing, camping, hiking, just to hang out. It’s a shared love.”

Filling the hours vital

On a beautiful night in June, about a dozen team members from the Boulder chapter hiked a trail at Chautauqua by the foot of the Flatirons. The rising full moon was obscured by clouds, but the lights of Boulder twinkled as Lisa (who did not want her last name used) admired the view from an overlook and explained what Phoenix meant to her.

“When you get sober, you wonder, ‘What am I possibly going to do with all of the hours I spent drinking and drugging?’ ” she said. “Fellowship is really, really important. It wasn’t that I didn’t have things that were positive and uplifting in my life that filled those drinking and drugging hours before Phoenix, it’s just that for me, being in this community feels like home.”

Loneliness is a huge problem for alcoholics and addicts. Lisa was in a 12-step program, but Phoenix was the “missing piece” that changed her life.

“I would never have been able to stay sober if I didn’t fill those hours,” she said. “The mind games we play with ourselves kill us. I would sit and isolate, and isolating gives my mind time to think, which gives my mind time to beat myself up. That leads you right back to the drink and the drug.”

Boulder member Greg Lilja has been through rehabilitation three times. He relapsed a year ago and spent two nights in jail. A friend from Phoenix who was worried called to check on him and took him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, then insisted Lilja go on the next Phoenix bike ride.

At the ride, Lilja apologized to the group for relapsing.

“I’ve never felt so much love,” said Lilja, 40. “From my family I got support, but they were like, ‘I can’t believe you did this.’ They were kind of behind me, but they didn’t understand. Everybody at Phoenix was like, ‘We get it.’ They were proud of me that I didn’t run and hide, I was right back out there. I got very emotional.”

Nick Saylor was a mountaineer until he was involved in a frightening rock climbing accident in Eldorado Canyon that could have cost the life of the friend he was belaying. The experience was so traumatic, his self-hatred so intense, Saylor quit climbing. He turned to his usual remedies in tough times, drugs and alcohol. He went four years without rock climbing.

After getting sober in 2010, Phoenix gave him back the sport he loved. That summer he climbed 24 fourteeners. Since then he has climbed the Diamond, a 900-foot vertical rock wall on the east face of Longs Peak. He has climbed Mont Blanc in France, the highest peak in the Alps. Now he and a friend are eyeing pioneering ski descents in Alaska.

“When I started getting sober and found Phoenix, all these people were so supportive that it opened that back up in my life,” Saylor said. “It was an unbiased, nonjudgmental group of people who wanted to see each other go out and succeed.”

Phoenix taught Saylor how to set a difficult goal and achieve it, something unknown to him before. He also learned how to be selfless, rather than self-centered.

“That’s what led to so much self- destruction,” Saylor said. “Most people in their acts of addiction are very, very selfish people. They’re only concerned about their own decisions, their own outcomes. Phoenix was an outlet to help other people, to become part of a community where it wasn’t about me anymore, it was about this group of people around me. They were trying to help me as much as I’m trying to help other people.”

They do it with love, with kindness and tenderness in a brotherhood of brokenness.

“It gives those in recovery a chance to be loved,” Harfert said, “like they’ve never been loved in their life.”

Mission: To foster a supportive, physically active community for people recovering from alcohol and substance abuse. Through a variety of sports, Phoenix seeks to help members develop and maintain the emotional strength they need to stay sober.

Membership: Approximately 1,000 in Denver, 300 in Boulder, 300 in Colorado Springs.

Cost: Free to members, supported by donations and grants. Budget is $1.5 million.

Behind the name: In Greek myth- ology, the phoenix was a bird that rose from the ashes of its predecessor.

The Post's ski and Olympics writer, Meyer covered his 12th Games last summer in Rio de Janeiro. He has covered five World Alpine Ski Championships and more than 100 World Cup ski events. He is a member of the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame and Colorado Running Hall of Fame. He regularly covers running and the Colorado Rapids.

Avalanche defenseman Erik Johnson had butterflies before Sunday's game against the Detroit Red Wings. It wasn't because of the big-name opponent, but rather his return from a 13-game injury absence and being stoked to rejoin a team in a playoff push and looking for its third postseason appearance in 10 years.